7 Days of Search and Social; the ultimate update

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How are we this week my fine SEO geeks and phreaks.. last week was a pretty busy one out in the search blogosphere. Lots of great search stuff including another look at microformats and RDFa, some interesting patents and even an announcement here on SEJ for the new tools be offered in conjunction with the gang at Raven SEO tools (a newsletter sponsor no less). A lot of folks are at PubCon this week, for those of you that aren’t…. we have a TON of great reading to keep you busy…

So let’s get it on shall we?

Lead Story

Start thinking semantics!

OK, admittedly there is no real ‘lead story’ this week as no one theme really jumped out. That being said, there were a few posts that lead to some good discussions for me…so let’s go there. Microformats and RDF….

So far we have a few elements that might make these more interesting in the near future…

Geo targeting; as the value of granular geo/local/international increases, microformats are sure to start playing some role (even if limited)

Rich Snippets – is another area to be looking at especially for those longer tail queries where these tend to be utilized. The snippet is a factor of a healthy SERP CTR… another important consideration

Images – can also be considered as far as geo-tagging etc … While not a major factor, it is another area I can see these becoming more and more important

Social – is the last link in the chain as Google (and other engines?) start looking more and more at our social network connections. This is another area that microformats will come in handy.

We can safely assume that the semantic web is (finally) becoming a value worth considering (and good webmastering too!). If you don’t use it… you should at very least learn more about it? M’kay?

Talk of the town

7 Ways to Maximize Internal Linking Value – is a good post over on Seer Interactive that looked at some simple, but not so common, considerations for the linker looking for new ideas. It’s worth keeping on yer list of link goodiness.

Shifting Search Marketing Strategy – Virginia Nussey’s head was spinning with the recent Google Social Search offering and might be reconsidering the value of social in search (we had a good discussion about this in the SEO Dojo chat session last week – fun stuff).

Microformats, the future looks semantic – speaking of our chat sessions, another we discussed last week was microformats. If you’re not already on the semantic bandwagon (with microformats/RDFa), then I suggest you do. Richard’s post is a good start.

Microformats: What, How, and Why – and since we’re on the topic, friend of the FireHorse, Steven Bradley (aka Van Gogh) was also writing about MFs/RDFa as well.

Using Blogger for SEO – Michael Martinez made a great case for using Blogger and why it is an important consideration for your ongoing SEO programs (and training). My fav had to be in the reasons; so we don’t “look stupid when people ask for help specifically with blogger”. Nice…

Fixing 404 frsutrations – from the gang at the Bing Blog we had a nice post on dealing with 404 issues. I have to say the Bing blog is doing some good webmaster material since the re-branding. Kudos to them for that

How Much Work Should You Giveaway in a SEO Proposal – Shimon Sandler takes on one of the older and more important conversations in the space. It really is a balancing act to give enough for clarity, without giving away the farm. For the record, I am a fairly stingy fella’ in that regard.

Custom Sections Directory for Google News – is a new feature released last week in Google news. It’s kinda interesting and after playing around some I created a SEO Geeks section (see here and follow wontcha?). As with all things Google, at the end of the day any value will be locked to adoption.

Borrowing from PPC – Peter gives us some sound advice on using PPC (among other tools including the Wonder Wheel) to tighten up your KW research and identify buying trends.

Google Dashboard – the creepy folks at Google ruffled a few feathers when they released a one-stop dashboard for all of their control over you…erm… I mean services you’re using. Me? No worries, I recently wrote about why Google should creep you out. (Here’s some coverage on SEJ)

Keywords That Click – Barry dropped a guest post at SEP on one of my fav conversations. How do you conceptualize SEO? Is it keywords or concepts? He does a good job of fighting the good fight (I am a concept guy myself).

Bing vs Google: A Comparison Study – Lee decided to do a little comparison shopping with G v B. This one is kinda funny as he contacted me when doing the (limited) research. I was a bit taken aback realizing that I haven’t used Bing enough. Although this post does seem to lean in the direction of that being a wise decision.

The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links – throws out a theory of how internal PageRank and related factors might be working over at Google. Eric (Enge) makes a good case which somewhat bears out algorithmically. If I were to add anything to the hypothesis, it would be to also consider temporal factors (from decay to QDF).

NEW Tools from SEJ – we all know that Ann is the queen of tools, now the gang at Search Engine Journal and Raven SEO have hooked up to offering a wide range of googiness over on SEJ. Here’s the official announcement, and there’s a post on using some of them over here.

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.